Second arrows - how we add to our own distress and what we can do about it

I recently mentioned the Buddhist metaphor of the two arrows in relation to regret but the metaphor is relevant to all forms of distress.

As I wrote at the time: "If you were struck by an arrow you would be in pain, no doubt about it. But if you dwell on that experience by going over and over it in your memory or by entertaining revenge fantasies for years afterwards, then you are shooting a second arrow into yourself."

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön says this, in Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living:

“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart...”

(Yes, you would be dead if someone shot an arrow into your heart but this is a metaphorical arrow so that's okay).

Part of the practice of mindfulness is to be willing to experience the first arrows that come every day (let-downs, bad turns, cravings, pain) and to do what you need to do but without adding to them by cycling scenes and thoughts in your head again and again. For instance, you could practice returning your attention to your breath or to your surroundings whenever those old scenes start re-running.

This is easier to do if you have a formal mindfulness practice but even if not, you can adopt the two arrows metaphor as part of your approach to daily living.

Mindfulness of breathing - guidance from Pema Chödrön

I have been exploring mindfulness of breathing and my search brought me to an article called What is True Mindfulness? on Pema Chödrön' shambala.org website and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody interested in this practice. Here are three instructions from the article and between them they contain what you need to know about mindfulness of breathing:

"The key thing here is, try not to watch the breath, but try feeling it go in and out, so you feel one with the breath. Just see if from the beginning you can minimize that sense of heavy-duty watching it, and just feel the breath going in and out."

"Then start to emphasize the outwardness and the space that the breath goes into, and emphasize that more and more. And then just see if you can let that sense of outwardness and space begin to pervade the whole practice more and more."

"... the other part of our meditation instruction is to label any thoughts we have as thinking and just let go of them and come back to the outbreath. That instruction encourages us to interrupt the constant barrage of talking to ourselves."

(In the first two paragraphs she is reporting the words of Trungpa Rinpoche.)

There are a lot of other good things in the article  which I would recommend to anybody interested in mindfulness to read at this link.